Ikiru Design

Because they’re easier than working on a new theme, I’ve whipped up a few more variations to BWO. The first, is BWO_space (demo here), which focuses on white space around the content. It’s rather interesting as an idea, but the execution’s far from perfect. The second is more pedestrian. It’s called BWO_invert (pictured above; demo here) and it’s BWO with, you guessed it, the colors inverted. Neither of them are very radically new or interesting, but I can’t seem to stop creating simple variations on my first theme.

Having been pretty satisfied with my recent modifications to BWO, I decided to move ahead an whip up a simple modification to it. In about 90 minutes, I assembled BWO_one, which is essentially a single column layout. The links normally in a sidebar are now in the footer. This allows there to be even more focus on your content. And, being something whipped up in 90 minutes, don’t forget that BWO_one probably still contains a few uglies — uglies I’ll try my best to remove in the future.

UPDATE: I’ve decided to move Ikiru to BWO_one, at least for a little while. I just feel like showing it off.

Since I released BWO a few days ago, I haven’t stopped tinkering with it. This means that it now has a number of improvements over the earlier version. A quick rundown of aesthetic improvements:

• Made h3 a useful — and correctly styled — way to add headers to subsections within posts
• Fixed lists (both ordered and unordered) so that they won’t look funny at the end of posts
• Added an “Edit” link on single-entry view — it’s next to the categories
• Improved Search Results so that they now display an excerpt in addition to the title
• Improved Archive view so it looks more like regular browsing
• Widened the sidebar — for ad support and for more data to fit
• Narrowed the content section — makes it easier to read (more top-to-bottom, less left-to-right)
• And the big one: Fixed the divider between the content and sidebar — it now will always run the full distance from the navigation menu to the footer

I also made many, perhaps more significant, changes to the back-end. These will be explained in greater detail later, but they make the theme much easier to understand and modify.

For more, visit the BWO page, or download BWO now.

I’ve released my first WordPress theme: BWO. It’s currently at version 0.42, the first one available for public consumption, but probably not the last.

BWO is a simple theme, and the only currently being used here at Ikiru. As you can see, its got just three color (black, white, and orange — the source of the name), one font (Georgia), and no images.